Page:Eekhoud - The New Carthage.djvu/324

296 Naturally, Laurent, in the majority of cases, took sides with the soldiers, provoked beyond endurance by the butchers and slaughterers of the Stone Mill.

He made friends, above all, with the newcomers, the novices, those who were most rebuffed and out of their element. For they suffered not only the affronts of the bourgeosie, but also served as butts for their seniors in service. Butts for butts, they were, for the most part, unsophisticated and massive peasant literally uprooted from their villages in the Campine.

Laurent followed the poor conscripts from those grey afternoons when lots were drawn and the militia-board met, when, muddied up to their loins, they fidgeted and bellowed in the mud and the mist of the streets, their caps decorated with red ribbons and colored papers, with the falsely foppish air of cattle, their eyes humid and vacant, arm in arm, beating out extravagant quadrilles.

Then he saw before his eyes these falsely joyous fellows during the first few days in barracks; instructors chosen from among the substitutes abused and molested these peasants, bewildered to the point of no longer being able to tell their name or that of their village. And the tortures to which they were put in the dormitories! Then their walks in the street, in their new uniforms, in coteries made up of men from the same district, coming together like chicks from the same litter; their admiring halts in front of shop-windows; their rocking gait, their rustic awkwardness; their vaguely troubled and begging air of lost dogs; the puerile travesty of a soldier accommodating himself badly to the handling of his weapons and